As she addressed the Tea Party convention this week, it became apparent that Sarah Palin is the talkin'-est woman in politics. Not to mention confused, mean-spirited, and kinda dumb. From cribbed answers on her hand to mangled grammar to Miss America hair, the woman embodies a movement grounded in ignorance and backward thinking.

Palin endorses a movement proud to call for a return to Jim Crow laws, that places spunk above political experience, and sees truck ownership as a necessary qualification to hold public office. This folksy fun is a lie, of course. Palin is plainly seeking to acquire wealth and influence, to join that very class--politicians--she claims to dislike so much. But lies are Palin's stock in trade. She lies about her administration in Alaska, about taking stimulus money, about foreign policy experience, hell, she lied about which magazines she reads. Even in the most benign situations, Ms. Palin cannot seem to summon the truth. Often, she simply does not know it. (Supreme court rulings, anyone?)

But Palin is talking her way into, if not real power, then celebrity and wealth. The more she complains about the "lamestream media" the more it covers her and increases her earnings potential. She rails against the "talk talk talk" of the pundits, but without them she'd be invisible and back in Alaska, forced to serve the people who put her into office. Instead, she serves herself.

And those who follow her will not be served by her. She works for herself, spending, for example, tens of thousands of dollars of her PAC money buying her own book to create the lie of writing a "best seller." Those supporting her need a better economy, more jobs, greater access to health care, tax cuts. Palin can promise only greater access to herself, her ambition and, of course, her talk talk talkin'.

Palin has disabused herself of all accountability. She no longer has to trouble herself with governing, with carefully considering her actions, making decisions. She talks; that's it. She produces nothing. She arrives, waves, talks, collects her money, and leaves. She is a member of the money-grubbing, talking head community she says she hates. She practices the very hypocrisy she identifies in others by making her living doing the very thing she rails most against: complaining and not doing. Ms. "we hunt because we eat" now has a staff, schedulers, handlers, and a bloated book contract. Her earnings (it is reported) have skyrocketed into the eight figure range this year.

Her politics of plain, truck-drivin' folk have become increasingly transparent and down right reckless. This week she called for a "revolution," and asked her audience to join her. Again, gleeful in her ignorance, Ms. Palin seems not to know that historically citizens suffer, kill and die when conducting a revolution. But of course leaders, those fomenting revolution, often do quite well.

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Let's hope, for her sake and those following her, that she can't talk talk talk an actual revolution into existence.

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Kellie Bean has been a Professor of English at Marshall University, an Associate Dean of Liberal Arts, and most recently, Provost of a small New England College. Author of "Post-Backlash Feminism: Women and the Media Since Reagan/Bush" (McFarland (more...)